WE’RE BACK!

Holy. CRAP. You guys. I am so glad that massive unpleasant experience is over and done with.

So, for those that are just now finding the site to be back online, welcome back to Selkie! I’m glad to see you again. 😀

Many readers managed to find my Selkie facebook page (www.facebook.com/selkiecomic) and my personal twitter (@strawberrycocoa) and may already know this, but for those of you who did not manage to find those resources, let me recap what happened over the past three weeks:

The website got shut down by my webhost on August 24th for over-consuming server resources. At that time, Selkie was hosted on a Shared Hosting plan, and the activity here was slowing down other websites hosted on that shared server. This caused a suspension of my account (without even 24 hrs notice, which I’m not very happy about to be honest).

After that, Hurricane Harvey hit the area where my webhost’s support staff operate from, which left me without a reply for most of a week. And even after support functionality got restored, once I started trying to get answers from them and get the website back up, it took the next two weeks of going back-and-forth to finally get a new VPS server set up (which should give the CPU resources needed to support the website).

So, it’s been a long and frustrating road, but Selkie is BACK! I’m ridiculously happy to finally have it back up and going for everyone.

During the downtime I continued drawing comics, which were posted to my Twitter, the Facebook page, and the public Discord Server for people to read while the website was down. For those of you who weren’t able to find those portals, you may go here to pick up from where the Account Suspension first struck.

Sorry it took me so long to get things fixed, but I am really really damn happy to be finally up and going with a proper website again. 😀

I still have some more backend stuff that needs to be patched up, so please catch up on the strips you may have missed during the downtime, and please come back on Friday for the continuation of the Eel-pocalypse.

Glad to see Selkie is back. But I have a concern. A few times over the last few days Norton AV declared this site as potentially dangerous. It wasn’t consistent about it, and just seems kinda random considering your site troubles…

Finally! I can’t believe your webhost was so incompetent to have the site down for all this time. Not to mention the reason they gave, like it was still the 90s. I’m pretty sure all of the competent webhosts figured out the “how do we deal with websites being too popular” problem a decade and a half ago. But at least you’re back up now.

While I was never _technically_ ASO support, I was support for another brand under the same monolithic parent company. They share support centers, even. The basics of the situation are as follows:

– The CPU resource limiter is automated and not particularly bright. It gives you the customary three strikes, but they only appear on your site’s control panel and never via email. And it starts counting again after 24 hours. So if you get a surge over a weekend… well, sucks to be you. Trust me when I say that support hated that as much as customers did.

– At least a couple of the Texas brands advertise themselves as being PCI compliant. That comes with a huge amount of security regulations, the practical upshot being that when all of a brand’s support centers are down, there are _maybe_ ten people capable of logging into those servers. And those ten people are the kind that Do Not Interact With Customers(TM).

– Generally speaking, the people in charge would prefer to sell customers upgrades rather than make their lower-tier services better. Which would be fine, if they’d be honest about the limitations of the lower-tier services instead of hiding all of the nasty surprises in the fine print.

NOTE: This is the admittedly-jaded ramblings of a former support rep for everyone’s favorite Big Blue Alligator Hosting Company, a division of Big Blue Compass Hosting Conglomerate. I didn’t like the company much when I left, but we had some top-notch support agents. Fewer once they cut the training budget, but that’s a different rant.

That pretty much sums up my experience. Got no warnings about it (I don’t check CPanel regularly, never even knew I had to) and was told after the fact “upgrading will fix it”. They wouldn’t even permit me to temporarily un-suspend the old account while the migration was being processed. Had to haggle like hell just to get allowed back into the CPanel so I could create a backup.

To be frank, I have never even heard of blocking a user from their BACKEND for an account related reason. That part was extra nuts to me.